Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who is a strange misfire for the show indeed. When Davies decided to step down, Moffat was the clear choice of successor, with both showrunning experience and having written several fan-favorite episodes under Davies. While Chibnall has his fair share of experience both in writers rooms and as a showrunner, his Who episodes were generally not held in high regard. Episodes like Cyberwoman for Torchwood were regular punchlines among fans. He had been out of the Who writers room for several years during Moffat’s tenure, busy on his acclaimed detective series, Broadchurch.
But there weren’t many other candidates for the job, and BBC doesn’t seem to trust handing one of their longest running series over to an outside candidate. So Moffat held down the shop until Broadchurch was finished, and in 2018, Chibnall’s first series as Who showrunner aired. Featuring no returning monsters (until the New Year’s special), global location shooting, a new aspect ratio, a new composer, the first female Doctor, and no major overarching narrative, it was the biggest shakeup the show had seen since Rose in 2005. Unfortunately, though, Chibnall doesn’t have Davies’ skill for melodrama, nor Moffat’s sharp dialogue and playful subversions. Often his only recompense for his stiff dialogue seems to be to throw a bunch of things on screen at once and hope you don’t dwell on any individual moment too much. Chibnall’s best work generally comes from working within procedural style formats, working within a system of established rules and stable group dynamics. Doctor Who is the antithesis of where his talents lie.
Despite having a female lead and a more diverse cast, this era’s politics are often more conservative than the previous runs. In series 10’s Oxygen, the Doctor dismantles a corporate space station that monetised air itself, proclaiming that “the endpoint of capitalism [is] where human life has no value at all.” Just over a year later, in series 11’s Kerblam!, the Doctor visits Space Amazon, sees workers being subjected to terrible pay and working conditions, and argues that “the systems aren't the problem… how people use and exploit the system, that's the problem” before killing socialist rebels working against the corporation (in this same episode, the system kills several innocent people). It’s a jarring contrast.
In series 12, the first South-Asian Master (The Doctor’s long time rival) works with Nazis, using a perception filter to hide his ethnicity from them. When confronting him, the Doctor disables the filter, proclaiming “now they’ll see the real you” before he is dragged off, presumably to be tortured, perhaps sent to a concentration camp. In Arachnids in the UK, the Doctor shames a Trump stand-in for killing a giant spider with his gun, and then locks all the other spiders in a room, presumably to suffocate. Perhaps there was a line somewhere in the original script saying that the spiders were transported to another planet, but as it is the Doctor looks like a hypocrite. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having a morally flawed character, but Chibnall era scripts rarely, if ever, acknowledge any fault with the Doctor. She’s treated as a beacon of moral virtue, rarely challenged by her companions. Most of the supporting cast seems to only be present to dispense exposition, with the little in the way of actual character. When they are given traits, it's often in a sequence unrelated to the driving themes of the episode, and never integrated into the story at hand.
Although series 11 veered away from established villains and characters, they immediately flood back in afterwards. The first New Year’s special features Daleks. The series 12 premiere brings back the Master and Gallifrey. Later episodes in the series throw in the Judoon, Captain Jack Harkness, and Cybermen. Series 13 and its specials bring back more Cybermen, the Weeping Angels, the Sontarans, the Ood, and the Sea Devils (and of course more Daleks). The final episode brings back several Doctors and companions from before many viewers of the modern series were born. It’s all a bit exhausting, a show folding in on its own internal history for the sake of nostalgia and empty fan service. The series 12 finale is built around a supposed plothole from one episode 45 odd years ago that was never mentioned again in the classic series, and Chibnall’s “solution” never answers its own questions anyway. To top it off, it’s delivered like a feature-length powerpoint presentation. Will we have a Doctor Who writer in the 2060s writing an entire multi-series arc to make sense of The Timeless Child? Hopefully the BBC has the good sense to cancel the show again before that happens.
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| it's morbin time |
While series 11 tries something new and stumbles, and series 12 relies far too heavily on returning villains and decades-old lore, series 13, alternatively called Flux, has a new host of problems brought on by the pandemic. The editing jumps around with no rhyme or reason, introducing plot threads for the end of the series in the very first episode, and constantly undercutting the most compelling standalone episodes by cutting away to an uninteresting overarching narrative. The last two episodes in particular are utterly disastrous, with multiple plotlines that go nowhere leeching limited runtime away from what actually matters. Several beats feel like the crew didn’t have time to film key plot points, and even the destruction of the universe itself is never resolved, despite a clear maguffin being introduced for that purpose at the eleventh hour. It’s a problem that extends to the last two specials as well, which I will be covering in part 2.
